This was our first time doing a booth for CES, and in a related post, I go into detail on what the experience was like, and provide "pro-tips" so you don't make the same mistakes I made as a first timer.

But in this post I'd like to explore one specific aspect of the CES booth - an interactive photo booth we set up.

The idea was to get people into the booth with an engaging item. We chose an interactive photo booth because it would give us a stream of content on both Flickr and Facebook that we could continue to repurpose through 2011.

I did a lot of research and settled on Breeze Systems' photo booth software. It's highly recommended by professionals, and although a bit nit-picky to use, once you get it figured out, it's very stable. It didn't fail us once. We used the foot pedal switch recommended by Breeze, so people could take their own pictures.

I imagine you might have questions about the setup, so just ask them in the comments below and I'll post answers to help you set one up yourself.

Denise and her team just adeptly and successfully handled the procurement of an E3 Visa for an Android developer we hired from Australia. I was so impressed with her depth and breadth of knowledge in the immigration space that I asked her to share it with the world, and she agreed.

In this knowledge-transfer session, Denise talks about:

If you have questions for Denise or want to hire the firm, you can contact them via their website, HammondImmigration.com. If you just have questions about the immigration process, especially from a startup founder's perspective, please put them in the comments below, and I'll ask Denise to answer them as she's able to.

Here's the video:

Just got off an awesome 75 minute video Skype chat with Denise Hammond of Hammond Immigration (video below).
Denise and her team just adeptly and successfully handled the procurement of an E3 Visa for an Android developer we hired from Australia. I was so impressed with her depth and breadth of knowledge in the immigration space that I asked her to share it with the world, and she agreed.
In this knowledge-transfer session, Denise talks about:
How the immigration process works, and how the permanent (Green Card) vs. non-permanent (H1-B, L1, E2, E3) processes differ
Pro tips on procuring an H1-B visa for an employee, including what to do and not to do
What the timeframe is and important dates are for going through the H1-B process
How to convert an OPT (student visa w/ work authorization) into an H1-B, and what the pitfalls are
How Australia carved out a special E3 visa that doesn't have the 65,000 annual cap limit, and how to take advantage of it
Why the Green Card process can drag on for 9+ years, how to handle it and handle employees or prospective employees who want green cards
Tons of more information!
If you have questions for Denise or want to hire the firm, you can contact them via their website, HammondImmigration.com. If you just have questions about the immigration process, especially from a startup founder's perspective, please put them in the comments below, and I'll ask Denise to answer them as she's able to.
Here's the video:

Today I was on the State of Mobile panel, hosted by Paul Sherman of Potomac Tech Wire at the Ritz Carlton in McLean, VA.

Paul Palmieri, the President & CEO of Millennial Media was the keynote, followed by the panel, which was comprised of:

I've got a video of the entire 2+hour event. It begins with Paul's keynote, followed by the panel at minute 37.

And speaking of Paul Palmieri, I have to give him props. He's a really friendly guy. I'd never met him, but he actually came up to me to say hello. Here's the CEO of one of the hottest and fastest-growing companies in the mobile space taking the time to seek me out and say hello. It was noticed and appreciated, and it made me wonder if Millennial Media is succeeding out of sheer force of awesomeness of its CEO.

Today I was on the State of Mobile panel, hosted by Paul Sherman of Potomac Tech Wire at the Ritz Carlton in McLean, VA.
Paul Palmieri, the President & CEO of Millennial Media was the keynote, followed by the panel, which was comprised of:
Charles Curran, General Partner, Valhalla Partners
Matt Jones, VP Mobile Strategy and Operations, Gannett
Daniel Odio, Co-Founder and COO, PointAbout
Ran Farmer, Managing Director, NetBiscuits
Moderator - Paul Sherman, Editor, Potomac Tech Wire
I've got a video of the entire 2+hour event. It begins with Paul's keynote, followed by the panel at minute 37.
And speaking of Paul Palmieri, I have to give him props. He's a really friendly guy. I'd never met him, but he actually came up to me to say hello. Here's the CEO of one of the hottest and fastest-growing companies in the mobile space taking the time to seek me out and say hello. It was noticed and appreciated, and it made me wonder if Millennial Media is succeeding out of sheer force of awesomeness of its CEO.
Here's the video:
Here's the Twitter stream from the event:
//
And here's another picture I took:

I've always been a fan of productivity & efficiency hacks to allow me to do more with the limited time in each day. But lately, I've been working really hard to institutionalize these things within our company, PointAbout.

Everyone reacts a little differently. Some people take to keyboard shortcuts easily, while for others using the mouse is a very hard habit to break. I would liken keyboard shortcuts to blogging: With both, there's a "valley of death" you have to get through before you emerge in the sunny field on the other side, and most people don't make it. Both blogging and keyboard shortcuts require several weeks or months of concerted effort to prove successful, but once you emerge on the other side of that time commitment, you look back with the realization you should've done it years ago, it's so valuable. Initiatives like the F1 GeekSpeed Challenge help make it a bit more fun.

One thing that's been easier to institutionalize has been the use of Basecamp , a cloud-based Software As A Service (SAAS) lightweight project management tool, instead of email. I've gotten quite militant with everyone around me that if a conversation turns into a thread on email, or if you know it's going to be one, it should be moved to Basecamp. There are several huge benefits to this approach -- again, not all of them immediately obvious. The first is that it allows you to assign owners and dates to tasks, something email is notoriously poor at. The second is that you have a threaded conversation, all kept in one place, and various people can be added & dropped to comments along the way as necessary (no more 'reply to all' hell). These benefits are nice when they're happening, but invaluable as time goes on and the knowledgebase builds.

Today I came across a great example of exactly this. Hayat, our admin, had asked me how to do some transcription work. About 4 months ago, I had previously trained another admin on this. Since I put the original training instructions on Basecamp, I was able to very quickly & easily call up the thread and just have Hayat read it + watch a video I had posted in the thread. That was it -- I didn't have to do anything more than point her in the right direction, the rest of what she needed was perfectly memorialized on Basecamp from the first time I went through it.

It felt so great and refreshing to have successfully stored the knowledge in a place where it could be readily reused that I did a video to show off the details. Here it is -- enjoy!

[1] In an effort to counteract information overload, I've started qualifying much of my written communication with a certain taxonomy. Since I won't be able to explain it to everyone, I'm writing this blog, which I'll send people to when they ask "what are the numbers all about?" I've even made a Magic Decoder Ring below. Well, technically it's more of a rectangle than a ring, but you get the idea.

I'm putting numbers in front of much of what I write in our internal company communications. I usually don't do it publicly, although I might start to, if it works well. For example, if I were writing this blog internally, I'd give it a [1], since it's of low priority. That doesn't mean it's not valuable, it just means you won't need the information to do your job effectively -- think of a [1] as an "FYI, a [2] of "I need a response when you can" and a [3] as "urgent -- I need an answer right now". We'll see how well this works. I've been using it for a few days and it feels good so far from my perspective. Feel free to leave your comments below telling me how you perceive it as a recipient.

Right-click here, then choose "save as" to download the image below.

[1] In an effort to counteract information overload, I've started qualifying much of my written communication with a certain taxonomy. Since I won't be able to explain it to everyone, I'm writing this blog, which I'll send people to when they ask "what are the numbers all about?" I've even made a Magic Decoder Ring below. Well, technically it's more of a rectangle than a ring, but you get the idea.
I'm putting numbers in front of much of what I write in our internal company communications. I usually don't do it publicly, although I might start to, if it works well. For example, if I were writing this blog internally, I'd give it a [1], since it's of low priority. That doesn't mean it's not valuable, it just means you won't need the information to do your job effectively -- think of a [1] as an "FYI, a [2] of "I need a response when you can" and a [3] as "urgent -- I need an answer right now". We'll see how well this works. I've been using it for a few days and it feels good so far from my perspective. Feel free to leave your comments below telling me how you perceive it as a recipient.
Right-click here, then choose "save as" to download the image below.

Tonight we did a showdown of 9 zinfandel wines under $9. The winner? 7 Deadly Zins. This is a super fun thing do to at a party -- just have everyone bring a wine of a certain type. We used white slips of paper to have everyone rate the wine on a scale of 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest) and then tallied up the points. It wasn't a ranking per-se, as each wine could score 10 points if you wanted it to (less pressure that way).

It was also interesting to see how some people consistently had opposing tastes.

Wine truly is an individual experience -- I live by the quote "Which wine is best? The one you like the most." A low-pressure approach like this makes it fun.

Here's the scoring & point totals of the wines we tried (all were Zinfandels):

(Note this wasn't on the traditional 100 point scale - just a summation of all the points garnered by our group of tasters on a scale of 1 to 10)

Tonight we did a showdown of 9 zinfandel wines under $9. The winner? 7 Deadly Zins. This is a super fun thing do to at a party -- just have everyone bring a wine of a certain type. We used white slips of paper to have everyone rate the wine on a scale of 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest) and then tallied up the points. It wasn't a ranking per-se, as each wine could score 10 points if you wanted it to (less pressure that way).
It was also interesting to see how some people consistently had opposing tastes.
Wine truly is an individual experience -- I live by the quote "Which wine is best? The one you like the most." A low-pressure approach like this makes it fun.
Here's the scoring & point totals of the wines we tried (all were Zinfandels):
7 Deadly Zins (61.5 points -- winner)
Running With Scissors, 2008 Paso Robles, CA (57.5 points & my personal favorite)
Bogle (47.5 points)
Sobon Estate, 2009 California (47 points)
Beringer, California (44.5 points)
Barefoot, California (41 points)
Buffalo Grove, California (39.5 points)
Canyon Oaks, California (36 points)
(Note this wasn't on the traditional 100 point scale - just a summation of all the points garnered by our group of tasters on a scale of 1 to 10)
[gallery link="file" columns="2"]

I'm a fan of the underdog. The guy that nobody really pays attention to because they're so focused on whatever shiny object is in the public eye. The guy who is quietly innovating and creating the most amazing stuff. Tim is that guy. He and 3 co-founders started a company in DC originally focused on making Facebook apps. Just 13 months ago, they had 30 employees. Before that, it was just the 4 of them above a 7-Eleven in Georgetown. Today, they have 1,20o employees and are easily growing past 2,000 this year.

I'm attending the Goldman Sachs 2011 Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco, CA. I'll be posting several blogs as I capture the content from the panels over the course of the conference.

Max Levchin and Bill Gurley (at least I think it was Bill -- tried to match a face from the Benchmark site) spoke today on a panel titled "Fireside Chat: Game Changers" discussing why large companies are typically unable to be game changers (the net: too much to lose). They had some interesting thoughts around Facebook and why friends + likes + advertising isn't working as well as Google's search strategy, as well as why Android is so important to Google. I'll have to see what these guys think about Socialize.

Here's the video:

I'm attending the Goldman Sachs 2011 Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco, CA. I'll be posting several blogs as I capture the content from the panels over the course of the conference.
Max Levchin and Bill Gurley (at least I think it was Bill -- tried to match a face from the Benchmark site) spoke today on a panel titled "Fireside Chat: Game Changers" discussing why large companies are typically unable to be game changers (the net: too much to lose). They had some interesting thoughts around Facebook and why friends + likes + advertising isn't working as well as Google's search strategy, as well as why Android is so important to Google. I'll have to see what these guys think about Socialize.
Here's the video:

Last week I spoke at TJHSS&T's Future Business Leaders of America club -- about 100 students who are not only science and tech geniuses at the #1 high school in the US, but also very interested in business and entrepreneurism. Thanks to Mayank Jain for the invite to speak -- I graduated from TJ in '94 and my brother Sam graduated in '03, so it was nice to be back, especially since we both live on the West Coast now.

I captured the content from my talk, titled How To Get What You Want, but the Kodak zi8 camera I use and love melted down during the event, so the audio gets very choppy very quickly and the video plays at 2x speed (sigh). Here are the slides, though, and you can still watch the video to get a feel for what the event was like. (You can also watch a previous talk I had at TJ where the video did work.)

I caught the 2nd half of the Online Local Panel with the following panelists:

I only caught the second half of this panel (I was at the Max Levchin and Bill Gurley panel) so I don't have a ton of notes on this one, but the video is interesting. You can also see other related panels where I captured content.

My notes:

local sales is critical... livingsocial hiring 400 to 500 more salespeople "in the street" this year alone... self-service products are not right for SMB; need to have "feet in the street" and it's time and labor intensive

I caught the 2nd half of the Online Local Panel with the following panelists:
Bill Austerly, CEO at Angie's List
Tristen Walker, Biz Dev at Foursquare
John Backs, CFO at LivingSocial
Court Cunningham of Yodle
I only caught the second half of this panel (I was at the Max Levchin and Bill Gurley panel) so I don't have a ton of notes on this one, but the video is interesting. You can also see other related panels where I captured content.
My notes:
local sales is critical... livingsocial hiring 400 to 500 more salespeople "in the street" this year alone... self-service products are not right for SMB; need to have "feet in the street" and it's time and labor intensive
Here's the video: